Clare worked with Chalfonts Community College as a visiting artist over three years as part of their Change School Project with Creative Junction.  The project focused on year 8 students working creatively with new technologies.  Using the poem 'Eating the Birds' by Margaret Atwood as inspiration for image making, students sculpted with scrap materials, light sources and cameras to create original artworks.  Students photographed their installations and worked digitally in Adobe Photoshop to develop rich imagery and text, incorporating layers and colour changes.    

“We ate the birds. We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted their wings, we wanted to fly as they did, soar freely among the treetops and the clouds, and so we ate them.

We speared them, we clubbed them, we tangled their feet in glue, we netted them, we spitted them, we threw them onto hot coals, and all for love, because we loved them.

We wanted to be one with them. We wanted to hatch out of clean, smooth, beautiful eggs, as they did, back when we were young and agile and innocent of cause and effect, we did not want the mess of being born, and so we crammed the birds into our gullets, feathers and all, but it was no use, we couldn’t sing, not effortlessly as they do, we can’t fly, not without smoke and metal, and as for the eggs we don’t stand a chance.

We’re mired in gravity, we’re earthbound. We’re ankle-deep in blood, and all because we ate the birds, we ate them a long time ago, when we still had the power to say no.”